Serbia

Biljana Srbljanović will hold a short workshop on the adaptation and dramatization of fairy tales from a contemporary perspective, together with Czech playwright David Košták. The lab will guide a group of students from the Dramaturgy and Theatre directing department of the Drama Art School in Belgrade to develop the structure, storyline and base for a future dramatisation, all the while offering a chance to learn tabout the close collaboration between playwright, dramaturg and director from the beginning of the process. After the workshop ends, students will develop and write their dramas. The main dissemination activity will unfold in the Youth Theatre of Belgrade, which is interested in staging the fairy tales once written. The workshop will focus on concepts from Vladimir Propp’s “Fairy Tale Morphology”, and on archetypes and universal concepts in fairy tales.

The workshop will be devoted to finding personal stories of the participants about which they would like to write a monologue/drama. The workshop will deal with the first phase of that process: awareness of personal material from which a story can potentially be built, processing and selection of that material, and the beginning of writing a monologue/drama. The cartoon Inside Out will be used as the basis for the workshop, based on which the participants will have several tasks: find their personal core memories (memories that most marked their personality and character), find the roles in their head that “speak” (adopted roles which are often fear, pride, disgust, love, etc.), and then focus on their personal fears, moments in life when they were afraid of themselves. In addition, an overview of key events of each participant’s life will be created year by year, as well as several more exercises for mapping different memories that are crucial for each of them. Based on all that, the participants will start writing their monologues/dramas. In the period after the workshop, they will be able to send their works to mentors, and to further develop monologues/dramas. In addition, the participants will watch performances based on personal stories (Our son by Patrik Lazic, How I Learned to fly by Paula Vogel) in the Hartefakt House during April and May.